Politics
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Liberal Sanctimony
One of the accusations from some of the readers at Ambivablog that I did not address is their feeling that I am a typical liberal elitist who thinks he ‘knows better’ than the beknighted fools who were conned into voting for Bush. The truth is that I think many decent people were conned into voting
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“Conservative” Doesn’t Mean What You Think
Ed. Note: This is the post I said I would be crossposting at Ambivablog (and Donklephant) in response to comments by her readers here: Thanks to Amba for inviting me to respond to those of you who take exception to my posts about Normal USA and Whom the Gods would Destroy. The negative reactions come
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Taking Exception
That’s what a lot of readers over at Ambivablog are doing with regard to my posts about Al Gore and Normal USA. I would describe the readers there as open-minded, Andrew-Sullivan Libertarians or maybe postmodern, conservative idealists, for want of any other easy way to describe so diverse a crowd. They are interested in religious
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Whom the Gods Would Destroy . . .
. . .they first make mad. Well the media gods don’t have the power to drive Al Gore mad, but they can make everyone think he is. Check this exchange (with commentary from The Daily Howler) from Chris Matthew’s show: MATTHEWS (5/21/06): Kathleen [Parker], you wrote a column recently—I like the phraseology—you said Al Gore
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Normal USA
There is no normal anymore. But it doesn’t matter because people want what they can’t have, anyway. People long for normal as unrequited lovers long for what they cannot have. And so they vote in the hopes that those who say they can deliver normal will do so. They won’t. Is what passes for normal
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The Politics of Zealotry
In 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that the real threat to American freedom was not from an outside assault, but from the devious manipulations of our own misguided leaders. "The greatest dangers to liberty," he observed, "lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding." Nearly 80 years after Brandeis’s warning, the
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Frodo Failed; Bush Has the Ring
That’s a bumper sticker I saw yesterday, and how apt to read it as this NSA thing breaks in the MSM. Even they can’t avoid it now. If it were just this, it would be bad enough. But it’s this and everything else. The enormity of what this administration has done is beyond our fathoming.
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Reality’s Liberal Bias
Reality is what it is, but obviously our interpretations of it are shaped by our biases. Most of us operate within a web of biases more or less supported by experience and factual information, and we make adjustements as we learn more. For extreme ideologues of the left or the right nothing comes into view
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Law of the Jungle (or Savanna, as the Case May Be)
RJ Eskow has a nice little post that supplements my Class Warfare piece of last week and dovetails with the piece yesterday about how Colbert "event" has become one of those things insiders have decided to pretend didn’t happen. Not one mention of it in Elizabeth Bumiller’s story about the dinner in the NY Times.
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Speaking Truthiness to Power
Interesting how the MSM courtier class has reacted to Stephen Colbert’s roasting of the President Saturday night–it’s as if it didn’t happen. From the Daou Report: This is the power of the media to choose the news, to decide when and how to shield Bush from negative publicity. Sins of omission can be just as